Update: Long Time No see

Hey folks, it just occurred to me that it’s been almost 2 weeks since I last posted on here. Sorry for the delay, looking through my old posts I’ve noticed that a good deal of them are just apologising for delays. I’m a serial offender it seems. Anyway, I thought I’d use this opportunity to update you on what I’ve been up to in the last 2 weeks with an open source twist. So here we go:

Firstly I’ve been wasting far too much time on IM (Pidgin) and Jaiku, nothing new in that I’m a born procrastinator. I’ve also been spending a lot of my free time in Liberty City on Grand Theft Auto 4 with my PS3 generally hating freedom. I’d like to say I’m a born wise guy in a Goodfellas kind of way but realistically I’m not. Great game though, if only it was open source (sigh) It was my birthday on Sunday and I had an nice Bank Holiday Weekend to celebrate which was cool, so far this doesn’t have much to do with open source does it?

One recent event that has everything to do with open source is the DVD I was very privileged to receive off the guys at The Peach Project. If you don’t know about the Peach Project, it’s an initiative to create a completely open source 3D animated movie using only open source tools like Blender, Ubuntu, Python, GIMP, Inkscape and so on. I’m amazed with what these guys have achieved and I think what they do is so important for promoting open source. Their latest film is called Big Buck Bunny and as the title suggests there’s a lot of fur involved, it’s beautifully animated and just beautifully made in general. The DVD comes with an extra disk containing all the materials you need to start making your own films using the characters, even the 3D models are on there. It’s all licensed under Creative Commons so you’re free to play. I urge anyone interested in graphics to go and buy a DVD to support these guys. Massive thanks to Campbell Barton for sending this to me, you’re a star!

As far as reviews go I’ve been testing out Fedora 9 with mixed results on this laptop and I’m currently about 1300 words through the write up. You can expect it very soon, in a day or two, promise 😉 I’ve also been podcasting as usual and I talked about Fedora 9 on the latest episode of Linux Outlaws if you want to hear what I think about it while waiting for the review of doom.

In the last week I also discussed an idea for a new project with Anna a very close friend of mine. She loves her Mac but she’s curious about Linux. she’s also a great writer and I think it would be a really good opportunity to get a fresh perspective on going Open Source. She wants to see if it’s possible to replace all her current tools with open source ones. We’re gonna look at that in the coming weeks and I’ll help her through the process. She’ll be blogging about her thoughts on her excellent blog over at http://abinarylife.com so be sure to check out this post relating to the topic. I also hope to get her to contribute to Linux Outlaws, she’s secretly very geeky and has some good technical knowledge. Look out for that in future. You can hear the two of us right now, yes right now on our football (soccer) podcast called On The Bench if you’re interested.

Ok enough shamless plugs for one post I think, I’ll stop it now I promise. I’ll be back with that Fedora 9 review for you very soon. Until then have a good one and keep it open source 🙂

If you’re looking for a game to run on Linux, I’d suggest checking out On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (http://www.rainslick.com/). I’ve been playing it for a few days now and really enjoying it. The game was made to run on XBox 360, PC, Mac, and Linux.

On top of that, the guys at PA dreamed up a distribution model/method that is open for independent game developers to use, which can be found at http://www.playgreenhouse.com

good luck with your friend, after all my trying to migrate people to linux (i did have three succesess) i finally discovered that some of my friends secretly decided to install ubuntu, without me knowing 🙂

Thanks Leon 🙂 Yeah the Peach Project has been around a while with Elephants Dream and so on but Big Buck Bunny was only just released. They’re really cool guys.

As for migrating people to Linux I know what you mean it’s often a struggle. I try not to force them because that’s a sure fire way to put them off. If they are curious I try to help them.

I will get back to Arch I promise, that hard disk failure while I was testing really messed me up, I need new disks for testing now but I may try and put it on my main laptop eventually. Hopefully I’ll get another disk before that though 🙂

i’m such a geek wanna-be! open source is so intriguing to me but i’m not a programmer – if i am, i haven’t discovered myself. :p

however, after reading your profile, i have new hope – i have musical abilities as well and i always assumed that being creative was exactly what was inhibiting me from being a full-fledged tech geek. it appears that maybe i was wrong…

Don’t worry I take the term geek as a compliment 😉 I am a musician and a geek, split personality perhaps but I know loads of geeks who work in the creative arts. I used to be a sound engineer and worked in theatres, lighting geeks and music geeks and kinds of creative geeks. You should check out open source, you don’t need to be a programmer. If you want help I’ll help you give it a try? That’s what open source is about, community and helping each other 🙂

gosh, that’d be awesome! i wouldn’t even know where to start. and i have a 6 month old so my time is limited. but i did teach myself css a few months ago so i know i still have the ability to learn. :] point me in the right direction so i can scope it out? then i’ll decide if i’m getting in over my head. :p so excited!

Well what are you interested in? Do you want to learn programming? If so I can help but why not just try using some open source programs. Are you a Windows or Mac user? Do you use Firefox? That’s open source. I use Linux as you probably guessed, if you want to check that out then I’ll help. Have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com and maybe download a live CD to check it out. You can try it in your computer without installing anything and get a feel for things. CSS is pretty hard so you obviously have plenty of ability to learn, don’t worry about that 🙂 I also think it’s cool you have a 6 month old don’t worry about that, congratulations.

Well to be honest I have no idea how hard it is as I’ve never done it hehe 😀 I like you’re thinking though that would be a good way to get into open source development if that’s what you want to do. Have a look through the Mozilla Developer guide that’s a good place to start. My favourite programming language is called Python and it’s open source, it’s also one of the most friendly to learn as well. You can write programs of just a few lines that will do useful things and you can use it on any platform Windows, Mac, Linux or whatever. Have a look at the Beginners guide on Python.org and maybe try some of the little tasks to start you off. It’s a brave new world out there, so go and grasp it 🙂 Let me know how you get on

That’s cool, Python is great, good luck with it. You mentioned CSS so if you’re into web development have a look a Django, it’s a Python framework for building really cool web sites which takes a lot of the pain out of it.